SeattleDTV.com and the Seattle DTV Assistance Center are a project of Reclaim the Media, in collaboration with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Educational Fund, helping Pacific Northwest residents prepare for the switch to Digital TV on June 12, 2009. Contact us at info@reclaimthemedia.org.

Local rganizational partners include Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, the Youth Media Institute, the Leadership Acdemy, the City of Seattle, and the Seattle Housing Authority.

LCCREF's DTV Outreach & Assistance Campaign is made possible in part by a grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), U.S. Department of Commerce.

In move to digital TV, confusion is in the air

The Federal Communications Commission sponsored a Nascar race car as part of its effort to inform Americans that on Feb. 18, television signals transmitted over the air will be transmitted solely in digital format. Old TV sets will no longer work.

It paid $350,000 to emblazon “The Digital TV Transition” and other phrases on a Ford driven by David Gilliland.

So how’s that going? In November, the car crashed during a Nascar race in Phoenix. It was the second crash in as many months.

And how is the digital TV transition going? According to critics, about as well, despite a major marketing campaign that includes nightly ads on TV.

According to surveys conducted by the Consumers Union, a consumer advocacy group that also publishes Consumer Reports magazine, while 90 percent of the nation is aware of the transition, 25 percent mistakenly believe that one must subscribe to cable or satellite after February, and 41 percent think that every TV in a house must have a new converter box, even those that are already connected to cable or satellite.

“We need boots on the ground,” said Joel Kelsey, a Consumers Union policy analyst. Mr. Kelsey advocated armies of people, from firefighters to television industry personnel, going into homes and setting up converter boxes for consumers.

A number of people involved in the switch to digital think the Feb. 17 deadline will leave millions of Americans bewildered when their TVs stop working.

More than 20 million households receive their TV shows using only an antenna, while about 15 million households have at least one TV not connected to cable or satellite, according to the National Association of Broadcasters.

Anyone who gets their TV signal over the air — whether through a rabbit ear antenna on top of the set or an antenna on the roof — will need to buy a digital-to-analog converter box in order to continue getting a signal. Some people may also need a new antenna.

A person can also subscribe to a cable or satellite service or buy a new digital TV. The fear is that those Americans least likely to understand or afford the transition — such as the poor, the elderly and the non-English speaking — will be most affected.

To help reduce the expense of acquiring the converter boxes, which cost about $50 for basic models, consumers can get two government rebate vouchers worth $40 a box. (Available at www.dtv2009.gov or 888-388-2009.)

About 40 million coupons have been requested, but to date 16 million have been redeemed, compared with an estimated 35 million televisions that will lose a signal. Adding to the problem: people who obtained coupons early this year, but never redeemed them, have discovered that they expire after 90 days. They are not allowed to reapply for vouchers (though they could use someone else’s coupon).

“This transition is possibly one of the worst understood consumer education programs in modern times,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst with the Envisioneering Group.

While the government and industry have invested large sums to get the message out, the problem is that the effort is too little and way too late.

“On Feb. 18, there will be a tremendous amount of finger-pointing,” Mr. Doherty said.

With time running short, the government is now urging Americans to request a coupon by the end of the year, assuming that it will take about six weeks to receive the coupon, buy a box and reconfigure the antenna to find the digital signals.

The National Association of Broadcasters has sent two educational outreach trucks across the United States, visiting areas with high over-the-air viewership. The organization has held more than 6,000 educational events to date, said Shermaze Ingram, its senior director of media relations.

Local stations regularly show commercials alerting people to the digital transition. Some stations run the alerts in crawls at the bottom of the screen. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund received a $1.65 million grant, and the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging was given $2.7 million to instruct people at community centers and other sites about the need to get a converter box and how to set it up.

The National Association of Broadcasters, which estimated that $1 billion in ads and other marketing efforts have addressed the subject, has volunteered to create a phone bank to handle an estimated one million calls from confused consumers on Feb. 18, and another million in the following days.

Congress has allowed analog stations to stay on the air an additional 30 days to broadcast educational messages about the transition. And the cable TV industry has agreed not to switch some of its channels to a digital tier until March 1, to avoid further confusing consumers about the broadcast switch.

There were problems from the start. Consumers complained on the Consumer Reports Web site that boxes were not available locally before their coupons expired. “Why can’t you reapply for a voucher?” said Mr. Kelsey of Consumers Union. “This is a transition mismanaged from the get-go.”

Mandated by Congress, the expiration feature puts the unused money allocated to the program back into the system to help finance other consumers’ purchases, said Meredith Baker, the deputy assistant secretary of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The program now has enough money to finance the issuance of 56 million coupons.

Those who have their converter boxes have discovered the “cliff effect.” If the over-the-air signal is not strong, the viewer does not receive a fuzzy picture as he might get with a weak analog signal; the viewer gets no picture at all because digital reception is all or nothing. In addition, depending on area, the rabbit ears intended to receive only VHF broadcast channels may need to be replaced with new digital units.

Most portable TVs, the type used by sports fans at the beach and ballpark, will not work after the digital transition.

And on the day of the conversion, consumers will also need to direct their converter box to scan for channels. (If they want an up-to-date electronic program guide, they will need to have the box rescan the channels regularly.)

To make matters worse, the transition date occurs when the weather in most of the country is at its coldest and iciest.

“We’re asking the elderly to go out in the snow to buy a converter box?” Mr. Kelsey said. “All we need on Feb. 18 is to have someone slip off their roof and get injured as they try to set up a new digital antenna.”

The media's job is to interest the public in the public interest. -John Dewey

Fair Use Notice: This site contains copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We have made such material available for the benefit of others and in the public interest, as part of our efforts to promote greater understanding of media and democracy. We believe this constitutes fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law (see http:// www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml). In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.